ARM: The Non-Evil Monopolist

yootje writes "ZDNet is running an article about ARM, a chip-maker who controls more than 80% of the cell phone market and 40% of the digital camera market. ARM shipped 780,000,000 processors last year. ZDNet finds it strange that no one seems to have anything against this company. And maybe it is strange: according to the article many would say ARM is a monopolist, but you never hear anyone say 'ARM sucks!'. But then again, why would they?"

Comments

Not just a monopoly.

[rebeka thomas]

Being a monopoly isn't illegal

Using your monopoly position in illegal anticompetitive ways however, is.

I thought ARM

[mocm]

only designs CPUs. Do they really manufacturethem?
The article only talks about CPUs shipped, but not that ARM ships them.
AFAIK ARM cores are use by many chipmaker from Intel to TI, but arm don't sell CPUs.

Re:I thought ARM

[tsho]

You're right.

It's well known that ARM is a Connected Community is a global network of companies aligned to provide a complete solution, from design to manufacture, for products based on the ARM architecture.

Look here: http://www.arm.com/community/

they do it differently

[Da_Slayer]

Maybe it is cause ARM does not really shove itself down people's throats. Their business practices help set them apart. In addition, they embrace open source/standards and it's ideals. An example: ...the OpenMAX(TM) working group to define a royalty-free, cross-platform API (application programming interface) that standardizes access to multimedia processing primitives used extensively in video codecs such as MPEG-4, audio and image codecs, and 2D and 3D graphics. The OpenMAX API will enable library and codec implementers to rapidly and effectively make use of the full potential of new silicon - regardless of the underlying hardware architecture.

Lets see free, cross platform, standardized and hardware independent. That meets all my requirements of a good idea(tm). Also their support for embedded Linux probably does not hurt them either.

Becuase they are unkown, mostly.

[Sycraft-fu]

There are plenty of other monopolies or near monopolies out there. Go read up on Sysco if you want one (they control basically all grain silos in the US). The ones people care about are the one that get press time. The ones that stay low on the radar, almost nobody cares about. Most people don't actually do a lot of general research, they just get in to whatever is news. You have to do a bit of digging to come upon lesser known monopolies.

Re:I kind of like ARM

[sacmog]

Hey, I have two ARM's and they don't suck at all. Maybe if they did I wouldn't need the ..... Never mind. Wrong topic. (Had to be said).

Student's ARM7 clone disappears from Web

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20011102S0121

Why do you pay attention to ZDNet?

[njdj]

ZDNet finds it strange that no one seems to have anything against this company.

What ZDNet is implying is this: "People don't like Microsoft because it's a monopoly. But they don't dislike ARM, which is also a monopoly. That's inconsistent and illogical."

Firstly, it's highly questionable whether ARM can be called a monopoly in the sense that MSFT is, because ARM has only about 80% of its market, vs over 90% in the case of MSFT. ARM's competitors have more than twice as much market share as MSFT's competitors.

But, much more to the point, ARM has not engaged in illegal practices to bankrupt its competitors. Remember, for example, Microsoft's piracy of Stacker's technology. Remember how they broke Netscape, by reducing the price of their own browser to zero by cross-subsidizing its development. Today, MSFT is trying to strangle Linux by concluding agreements with PC vendors which prohibit sales of dual-boot systems. These agreements, forced on PC vendors by MSFT's enormous market power, are almost certainly illegal, but taking MSFT to court would cost many millions of dollars and the case would last for years. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.

MSFT's attitude is, it's OK to break the law if you can get away with it or if the benefit exceeds the costs. That's why Microsoft is widely (and correctly) perceived as evil, not because it has a large market share.

maybe this...

[danalien]

maybe this link will shead some light on why no-one is agains ARM?! ....

..they aren't in the business of 'competeing in/on a manufacturing' bases, but to provide their costumers with the designs they need (Seems like a 'service oriented' approach, to me).

/* they make their money by licesing 'the final design' on some royalty-base *I guess*, and I guess their costumers sees those royalties as 'part of the manufacturing costs' and don't really care much more about them. +Plus it would cost 'them' more to R&D and Devel/Debug etc etc on their own, then to go with ARM .... Finally it brews down to 'costs' and it seems ARM provides a compelling cost-effecting product/service(s) .... */

Re:Why nobody complains

[h0tblack]

Arm have a very interesting history. They were originally setup by Acorn back in the early/mid eighties to produce a CPU for the future lines of desktop machines Acorn were producing (A3000, RiscPC's etc). This enabled Acorn to be the first with RISC-on-the-Desktop machines a long time before Apple came along with their claim to this title with their PPC based desktop machines about ten years later.
ARM were floated off as a seperate entity by Acorn (a very wise move which enabled ARM to grow where Acorn failed) with investment by Acorn, VLSI and Apple (they used the ARM in their Newton). Being a member of Acorn's enthusiast group I was offered dirt cheap shares and only wish I'd had the money to buy some as they rapidly increased in value. Part of this increase came about as ARM partnered with Digital to work on the StrongARM, before becoming rather closer to Digital, and then in turn Intel (as part of some agreement following the two large companies throwing law-suits at each other over unrealted matters). Intel's involvment with ARM enabled them to produce the XScale and no-doubt helped increase penetration in the wider mobile market.
It's amazing to see a company that I knew from a young age grow into such a pervasive entity. I still have a couple of old Acorn machines, the most powerful of which has one of the first StrongARM chips availible in it, it wasn't until a decade later that I got my next StrongARM, in the form of a much smaller Zaurus. There's also ARM's lurking in games-consoles (GBA, Dreamcast), routers, PDA's, portable music players, mobile phones, infact just about every type of small device. A Lot of people use products with ARM tech in them without even realising it.

Re:Because it was part invented by a lady

[Nighttime]

Actually, Sophie Wilson is a transsexual.

And before I get modded a troll for this, it's a well-known fact in the Acorn community. Acorn being the company that helped start ARM and produced a range of desktop machines using said chips. He/she also was involved with the design of the BBC microcomputer.

Bit if background

[aitsu]

I used to use an ARM computer when home computing was taking off in the UK. They weren't ARM then, they were called Acorn, building oddball "home" computers like the Acorn Atom. In the 1980s Acorn fought off rival bids from the likes of Sinclair to land a deal with the Department of Education and the BBC to develop the BBC Microcomputer and later the Acorn Electron. Its version of BASIC - BBC BASIC - became the programming language standard taught in all schools in the UK for a whole generation. In fact you could stick me infront of a Beeb now and I could probably knock off a simple text adventure without even thinking. ARM, incidentally, used to stand for Acorn RISC Machines. (Later, the 'A' came to stand for 'Advanced'.) Yes, they were in fact one of the earier companies to commercialise RISC computing with their R-series designs, which were also supplied to UK schools in the form of the Acorn Archimedes computer. The Archimedes was one awesome machine.

This is all from memory, however. Here's a more accurate history.

Re:Shipped?

[joe_bruin]

ARM shipped 780,000,000 processors last year

indeed, i don't think ARM shipped any processors at all. ARM designs and licenses cores. from low powered arm7's in your run of the mill mp3 player, to a 400+mhz arm9/strongarm/xscale in high end pdas. arm-based chips are produced by dozens of manufacturers in many countries. arm cores run linux (and have a big developer community), wince, and multiple embedded operating systems.

i think the real failing of the linked story, however, is that ARM IS NOT A MONOPOLY. sure, they may ship more chips than anyone else. they make a good product. but in the embedded world, there is choice. mips, 68000, super-h, powerpc, dozens of proprietary architectures, even low end x86. if arm decided to pull some of the stuff that intel and microsoft try, they'd have the bottom pulled out of them as everyone migrates to their favorite arch of the day.

Re:I kind of like ARM

[Biogenesis]

It might also be the fact that it's not a name you hear all the time...if at all (this is the first I've heard of them. Like a lot of M$ hate exists because there are millions of people using products that advertise that they are made by M$ and couple that with a mostly undereducated userbase and you're bound to run into problems.

So yeah, I think it's because when people see a computer crash they also see Microsoft (even if it's a dodgy realtek driver that actually crashed), result: Microsoft cops shit.

If you get a dodgy phone with an ARM chip you're going to see Nokia/Erricson/etc result: Nokia/Erricson/ect cops shit.

Likewise Olympus/Kodak/Canon etc will be blamed for poor cameras, again ARM gets away even if it's there problem.

Re:Because it was part invented by a lady

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true. He was Roger Wilson when he designed the ARM chip. She is now Sophie. She's fantastically intelligent, but does not suffer fools gladly. You really need to know your stuff if you want to talk to her, and she can be a bit intimidating. Not that she's unfriendly. She also wrote a fair chunk of RiscOS, and sits on the board of Eidos. If you look at Eidos games (eg Tomb Raider) you will find all the FMV scenes are in Acorn-originated Replay format. With this video codec Acorn computers could do full-screen FMV when PCs where struggling along with postage-stamp size video. Sophie is a visionary and we've a lot to thank her for.

Phillip.

These people may have something against ARM

[sjmurdoch]

In 2001 a student produced an open source microprocessor implementing a cut down version of the ARM instruction set, However not long after, ARM pressured OpenCores to remove the it from their website, and nnARM disappeared.

Maybe the reason people like ARM is that at the moment, most of their competition is from big companies and not open source. If projects like OpenCores catch on and FPGAs become cheaper then maybe open source can perform as well in that region as it does in software. Then I think people would not be happy with ARM taking down compatible products, just as people would not be happy if Microsoft went after WINE.

Re:ARM---

[aurispector]

The strong arm tactics employed by
MS, SCO, etc., reflect an implicit lack of faith that their products can compete fairly in an open market. If these companies really believed that their products and services were superior they wouldn't need to force people to use them.

What does this say about the RIAA & MPAA?